2/3/11

It's raining Wrens.

The other day I stumbled on a story related to all those birds dropping dead last month and it turned out that apparently, some of them were killed intentionally.

Here's an excerpt:

"Not all the mysterious bird die-offs that have been witnessed around the globe recently are due to unexplained causes. A recent mass die-off event witnessed in Yankton, South Dakota was traced back to the USDA which admitted to carrying out a mass poisoning of the birds.

After hundreds of starlings were found dead in the Yankton Riverside Park, concerned citizens began to investigate. Before long, a USDA official called the local police and admitted they had poisoned the birds. "They say that they had poisoned the birds about ten miles south of Yankton and they were surprised they came to Yankton like they did and died in our park," says Yankton Animal Control Officer Lisa Brasel, as reported by KTIV.

The USDA then confirmed the story and explained it was all "part of a large killing" in Nebraska. Some of the birds that ate the poison apparently flew all the way to Yankton before succumbing to the poison.

According to the report, the USDA has killed more than four million birds over the last several years. There's even an official spreadsheet here from 2009.

1,259,714 european starlings. That right there is a whole lot of birds. The USDA must really hate europeans for some reason. The really odd part is that each animal has a few different categories, and two of them are Intentional and Unintentional. For instance, the starling breakdown looks like this:

IntentionalUnintentional

1,259,714 2

So somewhere a conversation like this took place:

"Hey, how many starlings did we kill? Was it 1,259,714? "

"Yeah. Oh, and those two that Steve ran over with his SUV. Don't forget those."

I'd also like to know how they got such specific numbers. Who's the poor bastard who gets the job of counting up all the dead birds? "One... two... three... four...wow, this job really sucks... five... six... seven..."

Then like 14 hour later, "8,764...no wait...765? Crap, now I have to start over."

In other news, there's a group of feminist activists in Kiev, Ukraine. Femen's leader, 26-year-old Anna Gutsol, explains: "Our goal is active Ukrainian women who want to be involved in society and politics."

To me, that doesn't really sound like a traditional goal, per se, because saying your goal is "active Ukrainian women" makes you sound like someone who posts personal ads on Craigslist. But lack of effective mission statement aside, their main claim to fame is that they apparently do all their protesting topless.

Their official slogan is "Our God is woman, our mission is protest, our weapons are bare breasts."

Far be it from me to question their choice of weapons, but here is a short list of things bare breasts cannot generally do:

1. Shoot holes in stuff.

2. Protect your home.

3. Kill from a distance.

4. Kill.

You'll note that I said generally do, and that's only because I'm aware of this.

13 comments:

I live in MN and a few years ago when the Republican National Convention was held here the local government attempted pigeon birth control. When that didn't work, they did a full-throttle a pigeon kill. From there they swooped in a stole eggs out of nests (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,264381,00.html) to prevent future generations. Of course, after the convention and with no one left to influence, the sidewalks were (once again) alive with the slop of pigeon poop.

They killed just over 0,5% of the starling population in America. The starling is an introduced species, because some guys wanted people in America to see the bird species Shakespeare mentioned. They are a pest, eat crops and their droppings are even corrosive.

Hey Johnny, just a comment: When I go to share your posts on facebook, seems the first commenter's comment is the synopsis that appears under the headline. Don't know if you have any control over that, but....

They should probably forget the European Starlings and instead poison the African and European Swallows, on account o' the injuries caused by their dropping of coconuts on people's heads. They're able to do that, you see, because they can grip the coconut by the husk.

Wow, impressive that they have gotten away with it for so long without drawing any negative publicity and massive protesting.

The university in our city wants to get rid of a few thousand rabbits that are the result of many people kindly "leaving the rabbits to nature" on their property over the last 30 years. They have been unable to cull them due to mass protests - you should see these inbred, hole-digging, poop-leaving monstrosities that have taken over the campus...

You're totally forgetting about Aphrodite A from Tranzor Z. Her boobs were her weapons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphrodite_A#WeaponsOf course I can't remember if it was Aphrodite or Diana that I saw as a kid but they both had the same kind of weapons.